so various topics require of the writer various styles— the topic entering into the style and helping to determine it. One writing on different subjects will not write uniformly, if he writes naturally. "The perfectly endowed man will unconsciously write in all styles," says Herbert Spencer.

II. THE WRITER'S INDIVIDUALITY.-Room for the man himself is always to be found in his style. His temperament, tastes, attainments, culture-everything mental that distinguishes him as an individual-may be expressed in his use of imagery, his choice of words and his arrangement and articulation of them in the sentence, in the cast of his paragraphs—in all that goes to the making of style. It is not the business of rhetoric to rob one's style of this element. It should only wear down the sharp angles and subdue the writer's peculiarities, so that his style shall be free from mannerisms-everything offensively characteristic of him. And this is done by the element of

III. AUTHORITY.-The principles which eminent writers have consciously or unconsciously observed furnish rhetoric the lessons it is to teach, and point out to the pupil the paths he may follow. What they have done is permissible to him, what they have found they could not safely do is unlawful. And this element enters largely into all style that becomes classic, putting a curb upon the author's eccentricities, and becoming a spur to every effort made for the perfecting of his style.

The first cardinal quality of style is

PERSPICUITY.-Perspicuity is distinctness of expression, transparency. Our thought should be seen through our words, requiring of the reader or hearer no careful search to discover it. What the air, washed clean of smoke and vapor and dust, is to the trees and the rocks of dis

tant hills, bringing them near and into sharp distinctness, that should our language be to the thoughts it contains. Since we write to communicate something, our purpose is defeated if we are not clear; we might better have spared our poor labor. It is a duty which every one owes the reader or hearer to speak not simply so that he can be understood but so that he cannot fail of being understood. One has no more right to take another's time and energy in a hunt for the meaning than he has to take his fruit or his wares without compensation. To be perspicuous, then, is only to be honest.

Perspicuity is to other qualities of speech what light is to colors-that by which they exist and are seen. Style that lacks it has few excellencies that are apparent, as the discourse has little thought that is obvious.

A RELATIVE QUALITY.—But it ought to be said that perspicuity is a relative quality. That is, what would be clear to one reader or hearer might not be to another of fewer years or less culture. Style perfectly plain to an audience of scholars might be obscure to men and women less intelligent, or to children, just as food easily digested by a man in vigorous health might be indigestible to an invalid. In judging the style of any production, it is but fair to take into account the ability of those for whom it is intended.

Perspicuity depends

I. UPON THE AUTHOR'S MASTERY OF HIS SUBJECT.-Much mistiness of expression is only the haze which partly hides the subject from the writer. The subject is seen by him but only in the gray dawn, it does not stand revealed in noon-day light. Remember that you cannot convey to others more than you thoroughly know, or make your thought clearer to them than it is to yourself.

It will be a triumph if you can make them see what you see and see it as clearly. The work of accumulating material and of preparing frameworks, insisted on as preliminary to the writing, will be of great service here. It will supply you with the knowledge needed, and will distribute the facts, dropping each item into its place and so bringing order out of confusion. Seeing everything you need, and seeing it where it belongs, your task of making it apparent to others should be comparatively easy.

II. UPON HIS USE OF WORDS.-This subject, which will run through many Lessons, must be subdivided.

1. USE SIMPLE WORDS.-The simplest words in the English language are those which belong to the motherelement of it-the Anglo-Saxon. These were never so highly compounded as were the Latin and Greek, and so are simpler; since each word in a compound enters its meaning into that of the whole. They were never so highly inflected as were the Latin and Greek, and nearly all of the few inflections they once possessed fell off during the three centuries after the Norman Conquest; and so these words are the shortest in the language, and for that reason the simplest. Besides, the Anglo-Saxon were the original words in our language, used to name the things known to our ancestors, and to denote the qualities, acts, states, and relations of these things. They are thus our household words, and are better understood by all, even by the educated. Prefer them where you must express yourself with great simplicity.

Direction. Find Anglo-Saxon expressions, each a single word, where it is possible, for these good words of Latin and Greek origin, and use them in sentences of your own :

Residence, aggravate, instruct, invalidate, circumspect, dis

parage, atmosphere, occult, isothermal, deposed, extinguish, idiosyncrasies, termination, reside, accomplish, obliterate, ethereal, pabulum, æsthetic, supersede, interpolate, anomaly, tortuous, philanthropic, subordinate, simultaneous, deplorable, elimination, circumlocution.

LESSON 32.

USE OF WORDS-SIMPLE WORDS.

Direction.-Rewrite this paragraph with great care, finding, where it is possible, Anglo-Saxon words for those italicized:

When an intelligent foreigner commences the study of English, he finds every page sprinkled with words whose form unequivocally betrays a Greek or Latin origin, and he observes that these terms are words belonging to the dialect of the learned professions, of theological discussion, of criticism, of elegant art, of moral and intellectual philosophy, of abstract science, and of the various branches of natural knowledge. He discovers that the words which he recognizes as Greek and Latin and French have dropped those inflections which in their native use were indispensable to their intelligibility and grammatical significance; that the mutual relations of vocables and the sense of the English period are much more often determined by the position of the words than by their form, and in short that the sentence is built up upon structural principles wholly alien to those of the classical languages, and compacted and held together by a class of words either unknown or very much less used in those tongues. He finds that very many of the native monosyllables are mere determinatives, particles, auxiliaries, and relatives; and he can hardly fail to infer that all the intellectual part of our speech, all that concerns our highest spiritual and temporal interests is of alien birth, and that only the merest machinery of grammar has been derived from a native source. Further study would teach him that he had overrated the importance and relative

amount of the foreign ingredients; that many of our seemingly insignificant and barbarous consonantal monosyllables are pregnant with the mightiest thoughts and alive with the deepest feeling; that the language of the purposes and the affections, of the will and of the heart, is genuine English born; that the dialect of the market and the fireside is Anglo-Saxon; that the vocabulary of the most impressive and effective pulpit orators has been almost wholly drawn from the same pure source; that the advocate who would convince the technical judge or dazzle and confuse the jury speaks Latin; while he who would touch the better sensibilities of his audience or rouse the multitude to vigorous action chooses his words from the native speech of our ancient fatherland; that the domestic tongue is the language of passion and persuasion, the foreign, of authority or rhetoric and debate; that we may not only frame single sentences but speak for hours without employing a single imported word; and finally that we possess the entire volume of revelation in the truest, clearest, aptest form in which human ingenuity has made it accessible to modern man, and yet with a vocabulary wherein, saving proper names and terms not in their nature translatable, scarce seven in the hundred are derived from any foreign source.

In this passage detailing the function of the Anglo-Saxon and of the Latin in English, George P. Marsh is unjust to the Latin. The author of this work has recently examined the entire diction of Rufus Choate, and a large fraction of that of twenty other eminent literary men-ten British and ten American. Over sixty-one per cent. of Choate's 11,693 different words were found to be Latin, more than six per cent. Greek, and less than thirty Anglo-Saxon. The percentages of the others are about the same. We submit that, if the AngloSaxon so nearly sufficed for all our needs as Marsh claims, these men would not have been driven to a diction so overwhelmingly classical. Indeed, if we count each word but once, we shall find that Mr. Marsh here uses,to praise the Anglo-Saxon, sixty per cent. of classical words!